European Banks Hit by Cyber Thieves

European Banks Hit by Cyber Thieves

A security firm has reportedly discovered evidence of cyber thieves stealing more than 500,000 euros over the course of a single week.

The firm Kapersky Lab said it had detected the computer server in January that was being used to coordinate the attack, and believed most of the victims were based in Italy and Turkey.

The firm have not identified the bank involved and added that the criminals managed to delete any evidence before they could be revealed.

Kapersky believe a Trojan program was used to intercept financial data and allow fraudulent transactions to be made, and according to the computer logs it had obtained, the sums stolen from each account appeared to range from 1,700 euros to 39,000 euros.

Vicente Diaz, principal security researcher at Kapersky Lab said: "On the command-and-control server we detected there was no information as to which specific malware program was used in this campaign.

"We believe the malware used in this campaign could be a Zeus flavour."

Zeus was the name given to a malware detected in 2007 which allows data to be stolen from computers using the Windows operating system.